It's widescreen

Usually it's just my sister and I renting movies but I ended up at Rogers with both my parents without any clear indication as to what she meant by "bring home a movie or something".

We started at the foreign films and found that alas, everything we wanted to see was out, including a film described as "a black comedy with dire consequences". I can't remember what it was about exactly, or what it was called, but it had a picture of a hospital stretcher with a crumpled pile of clothing and a bunch of cats on it and that means that I have to watch it. Definitely.

Mom grabbed The Illusionist and began to read out the parental warnings on the back. I don't think we really bother with the plot synopses anymore, mostly because what's on the original packaging is always horribly vague and whoever writes the ones on the in-store packaging is clearly an idiot. These days we go by the picture, the name and how much sex, drugs and violence we are warned about. Murders and suicides and sex - it's all good.

Down to the checkout, where the girl who rang us through made the mistake of telling us what we already knew and were keeping secret from dad: it was a widescreen dvd. "What? Pardon me?" he asked, "I didn't hear you..." and she had to repeat it three times while he frowned and got upset that it wouldn't work in the tv. We had to assure him that it was fine before we could pay and leave the store.

So the movie: visually excellent, but it just didn't quite grab me in the beginning. Maybe it was just that the opening flashback sequence was kind of a boy meets girl, boy loses girl cliche. Regardless, not a bad movie. I don't know. I'm notoriously bad at reviewing films.

Keep me away from photoshop please

Ancestral arborite

This would be the arborite on my kitchen table. The garish chrome screams '50s and it predates my father a bit, being the table that was in my grandparents kitchen when he was born. My best guess is 52.

Legend has it that some of the grunge deep in its cracks and crevasses it is actually the remnants of the first real food breakfast my father ever ate, but I'm willing to pin that on my aunt Gay.

But then again, there was always a thin layer of almost inperceptible-yet-slightly-sticky grunge on certain things at my grandparents' house, mostly things my grandmother touched. The table, the inside corners of the drawers, the TV remote, the phone... It's not like she never cleaned. The only source that I can think of is the nasty habit grandma has always had of giving food that missed her mouth a little flick with her finger to get it in. It has always grossed me out.

Sometime in the summer I'm going to soak it in lysol and attack it with a toothbrush to try and get the grunge out. Not that that hasn't already been tried unsuccessfully by several people over the past fifty years, but I haven't done it yet and like them, I want to say I tried. Until then, the ugly tablecloth stays on.

I was thinking that it's about time that I start taking pictures of textures again. I love them.

Swan song

Arnie could have been a really excellent graphic designer, but instead he wanted to be a rock star, which was sad because he couldn't play guitar worth a damn. No matter. He wasn't the sort of person to take direction from anyone, and couldn't handle criticism so he never bothered with lessons.

Instead he dropped three grand into a titanium alloy guitar. He and that metal monster of a thing moved up to Tofino, because naturally, if you want to attract the attention of the majors, you move away from the city, not towards. This was his logic.

The beautiful thing about titanium is that it has a fairly high melting point so when his shack in the woods burned to the ground three years later, we assumed with suppressed giggles that the guitar had survived, though we never asked.

One time he bought a large sheet of red glass - about a metre square - and set about painting a pair of black swans on it with India ink, shaded completely with Led Zeppelin lyrics. He spent hours on it and it was beautiful. I wish I had a picture. It wasn't the first time he'd done something like that, but that one was the best.

After he was finished, he packed it up carefully and paid a horrendous amount to ship it to Jimmy Page in England, because apparently he keeps black swans on his estate, or at least, he did at the time. I don't know what happened to it after that, but I'm sure that it was definitely a change of pace from the regular, run-of-the-mill fanmail.

Red glass is the most expensive glass, because it has gold in it. I know because I designed a window almost exclusively of red glass once, red and sky blue glass and lead and black ink, but through the tiniest bit of carelessness and a large amount of bad luck, it ended up shattered on the basement floor, and cleaning it up felt a lot like mopping up the blood of a loved one. At the time, at least.

I went to Smith's Glass in Victoria and spent about $200 to replace the glass, but my motivation was gone and now it sits out in my parents garage, underneath the silversmithing bench. I never finish anything anyways.

Goo

They're starting to build a new house on the corner across from the boat at the edge of the elementary school playground. I was shocked to see it come down last month. It was Michael Kerr's house. I think we went to kindergarten together.

Every year for Haloween his parents used to turn their garage into a haunted house with lots of streamers and cobwebs, flashing lights and sound effects. Once you had managed to get through to the back of the garage, you got the standard handful of candy and then your pick of creepy crawlers that Michael had made himself.

You remember creepy crawlers, don't you? They were kind of like easy bake ovens for boys. You filled the moulds with purple and green goo and then waited with eager anticipation for the oven to ding so you could peel rubbery cockroaches and spiders out of them. They were the absolute coolest toy, because what child is immune to the infinite charm of goo and bugs?

I certainly wasn't and I needed my own creepy crawlers kit. I needed it. I NEEDED IT because it was so damn cool. That'd be about the same year that I was Dracula for Haloween and frightened that people would recognize me through the disguise because of my very distinctive squarish-with-receeding-corners hairline, I dictated that my mom should make some facepaint modifications to my face which resulted in the most retarded black triangle in the middle of my forehead, which, for whatever reason, was in no way connected to my hairline at all.

Long after the candy was gone, the rubber bugs remained and I finally convinced my parents that I too needed to be able to fill the world with my own gooey creations. I opened my presents on Christmas day only to find that I had gotten treasures and trinkets instead. It was practically the same thing as creepy crawlers except that it was coated in pinkness. Instead of using green goo to make centipedes you used pink goo to make hearts, stars and birds. This was clearly not the same.

As far as girlie toys go, I only ever had a cabbage patch doll. No barbies, no my little pony, no polly pocket or whatever everyone was playing with at the time. I had, however, a full set of mutant ninja turtles action figures and a large assortment of books. The only explanation as to why I got the wrong gift was that they were out of the cool version, maybe. Because otherwise it makes absolutely no sense.

I am not a lost and found, people. Kindly leave your assasin scarves somewhere else.

So last night when I got home I found a silk scarf draped over the handle of my door. My initial thought was that someone had left me a gift or something and that that was really cool. I took it inside only to find that soon after touching it my hands were permeated with some of the most disgusting perfume - the kind of stuff that reaches right to the back of your throat and chokes you with its stench and then lingers in your nostrils for hours.

I am plagued by a sensitive nose. I tend to avoid the cosmetics sections of department stores and craft/hobby/gift shops that sell things like scented candles and oils, mostly because they tend to rob me of my ability to breathe, an ability that I rather enjoy having.

Not only that, I have hands that seem to lend themselves well to carrying the smells of anything that I touch - money, fish, oranges, onions etc. After making dinner, my hands can smell like onions for days, no matter how much I wash them, and when they smell like something other than nothing at all, I have a habit of sniffing them often. It's a dumb thing that I do.

On realizing that the scarf was full of such an offensive perfume, I dropped it on the floor and washed and dried my hands four times to get the smell out before returning with salad tongs to dump it into the laundry basket.

That would be the end of the story except that I woke gasping and choking in the middle of the night to find that the scarf had crept all the way across my room from my laundry basket to work its nasty little fingers around my neck and was pressing its thumbs deep into the soft spot at the base of it, just above my collarbone.

I banished the damn thing to the hallway so I could get some sleep.

What kind of rotten people would do that to me? Honestly.

Erin woss here

My grandma doesn't remember what my father's name is, which isn't anything new. "Did you have lunch today?" my aunt asks.

"Yes," grandma replies.

"What did you have?" Gaynell continues.

"Well, I had you!" grandma states, matter of factly.

Sometimes I think that when I'm old I want to be really senile so I don't have to really know what's going on. Grandma isn't aware that her roommate died a couple of weeks ago, and in some ways that's really sad, but in others, it's probably better that way.

But then again, for her every day for the past week has been the day after Grandad died, which isn't so good, so I don't know.

Yes, I'm still using photos from last November. This is a photo of a train that is falling apart in Woss, BC. Woss is a little logging town and aside from houses and logging-related things there, it has a small community hall, a trailer that serves as a library and a general store, which is pretty much the hippest place in town. It's a gas station that doubles as practically everything else - movie rentals, grocery store, fishing tackle, giftshop, hardware store.

All this is really immaterial. All that really matters is that in the washroom in this particular store people have written all sorts of graffiti:

I woss here!
Wossup!
Woss eating you?

♥ animation

The Faint - Agenda Suicide



Matthew Good - While We Were Hunting Rabbits

The hangar

I think I may have fixed the irritating double window problem with the comments on this blog.

I took some pictures today and I was going to write a post about them but they all managed to be blurry. I'm not entirely sure how that happened.

So, for lack of anything better to say or post, I'm going to dig up some photos from Thanksgiving last year. There's an old WWII aircraft hangar up at Coal Harbour, I believe, on Vancouver Island. Why Vancouver Island? Well, to protect against the Japanese invasion plan that never really existed in the first place. At the time there were no roads in or out. Everywhere you look there is a concrete slab, so I guess that's how the poor bastards kept busy.



But anyways, what do you do when you find a kind of run-down building that you're probably not supposed to go into? Go inside and take pictures, of course. Seems to me I've already posted some pictures of holes in the windows on this blog, maybe around early December of last year, if you care to check. Here are some that I haven't posted before. The third is my favourite.

My name is macaroon

The object of the game is to see how much you can smuggle into the movie theatre without being caught. The more unorthodox the food the better. This time it was three packages of pudding cups, two bottles of pop, a package of cookies and miscellaneous things that we bought from the bulk bins, including half a kilo of macaroons. Maybe next Wednesday we'll try a cheesecake.

It's not that hard, really. They don't even look twice when your friend walks in from the snow in a tshirt with his jacket wrapped up in an oddly bulky bundle or at your friend who has a huge, huge purse. Me? I'm just chubby. Or pregnant. We're not sure.

Anyways, we got in there only realize that we didn't have spoons for our pudding so I got them from the food services people. Since there was no one else really there last night I couldn't help but think that they noticed that we got spoons and no food but the guy behind the counter thought I was cute. Pfft.

We saw Smokin' Aces. Not my kind of movie on the best of days, but not bad, I guess. Lots of guns and blood and shenanigans. Colourful characters, but I thought there were too many of them and too many flashbacks and things happening all over the place to really focus on anyone but the guy who they were all trying to kill/save but mostly kill, a man who, unfortunately for the movie, I didn't really like. All in all, it was missing something, somehow. I'm not sure what. But like I said, it's not my kind of movie.

Something about today put me in a good mood. It may have only been the weather, but I hope it stays. Whenever I feel good I secretly hope that it's here to stay, which makes it that much harder when it turns out that that's not the case. Sometimes I get the feeling that if I just accepted that I will always feel crappy the majority of the time that I wouldn't get that little pang of despair as I'm falling into it again.

But today I was in a good mood. I'll leave it at that.

Is that pudding in your pants or are you happy to see me?